Building Loyalty with Services Your Customers Actually Love

Products & Services that Build Loyalty

Even some of the most well-known companies have fallen into the trap of offering a product that consumers are not looking to buy through them. In the 90’s, Pepsi tried to release a breakfast soda, and Cosmopolitan magazine tried to release a yogurt brand – both were flops. It seems neither company sufficiently considered the demand, logical fit, and quality of the new product offerings. Was there a big market out there demanding a better soda to drink in the mornings? Or a demand for yogurt manufactured by a magazine? Likely not. Companies across all industries can learn lessons from these failures, ones that can apply to offering both products and services. Gone are the days that adding just any additional product or service will do – consumers are only rewarding differentiation that meets their needs and truly adds value to the quality of their lives.

Identifying Services that Consumers Love and Want to Buy From Your Company

Demand - In order to identify products & services consumers love and will actually find valuable, it’s important to start by looking into what problems and concerns they are already facing. Research by the Federal Trade Commission, University of Texas Center for Identity, and many more reputable research organizations have shown that one worry plaguing consumers is threats to their data security and resulting identity fraud. What’s more, according to Javelin Research & Strategy’s 2019 Identity Fraud Study, there were 14.4 million victims of identity fraud in 2018. Moreover, those identity fraud victims in 2018 experienced a heavier financial burden with consumers reporting to have lost nearly $1.48 billion to fraud – an increase of $406 million over what consumers reported losing in 2017.

Fit - Once your business has identified a proven consumer problem to address, like identity fraud, they should consider if your company would be a logical fit to address it. This is where Cosmopolitan could have gained some important intel when deciding if yogurt made sense for them. Just because there is an opportunity in a market, does not mean customers will look to your brand to fill it. One service many consumers are looking to businesses they already trust – like yours – to purchase from is identity protection. Over 50% of consumers shared they will look to their financial institutions to purchase identity protection, and over 40% will look to their insurance providers.

Quality - A third, and equally important consideration, is to evaluate if the features included in the service/product will help address the problem they intended it to solve. In the identity protection market, many products may appear to be very feature-rich at first glance. While we don’t know of anyone actually offering leprechaun identity theft protection, too often these service providers don’t start in the right place when developing their features – by looking at the people they will serve – so the resulting features can sometimes be unnecessary and unwanted. This approach leads to the development of products pumped full of features that drive up the cost without protecting consumers from the risks they are most often concerned about and actually facing. Offering products like these will not drive customer loyalty. To explain this further, let’s assume, for example purposes, that there was a large market of consumers looking to eat yogurt made by the same company who published their favorite magazine. Well, then Cosmopolitan’s yogurt would be an in-demand and logically fitting product. However, it would still not be a successful one if it tasted bad, because then it would not meet all three of the critical requirements to be valuable to consumers – in-demand, a logical fit, and quality.

It's a Match!

The aforementioned third consideration highlights the importance of carefully selecting the right strategic partner to offer any product or service your business does not develop in-house. As explained above, identity protection is a service that could help your business achieve its customer loyalty and resulting retention and revenue goals. And offering it through a trusted partner like Iris Powered by Generali can make the associated costs of offering it minimal, further driving your company’s ROI.

At Iris, we pride ourselves on being a people-first organization by continually researching the challenges potential customers and partners are actually facing and concerned about, and developing technology and services to address those needs. Additionally, we continuously conduct user testing to ensure our product is user-friendly, and in doing so, encourage the level of engagement that maximizes your customers’ and members’ protection. This helps us ensure that our partners and their customers don’t have to compromise on having identity protection that adds value to their lives and businesses.

With 55% of consumers reporting they are likely to purchase an identity protection service, there has never been a better time to learn how we can partner with your business to offer it to your customers.

To learn more about how Iris can help you achieve your business goals, request a demo now.